Recent developments have seen high-performance microfluidic mixers used for manufacturing nanoparticles at industrially relevant flow rates (e.g. 10-12 mL/min). While these mixers have seen significant adoption in the drug development market, the mixers used at present are difficult to manufacture and have certain performance limitations. At the same time, there is a market for a mixer that can work at much smaller volumes (on the order of one hundred microliters). The high flow rate required to operate existing mixers, along with the volume lost, make them unsuited for such an application. One solution would be to miniaturize existing technologies, such as a Staggered Herringbone Mixer (SHM), with smaller dimensions. However, such a device would require features <50 μm, which would be hard to fabricate using the tools traditionally used for machining injection molding tools (the preferred method of mass production of plastic microfluidic devices).
In view of the inherent difficulties of miniaturizing traditional microfluidic mixers, new mixer designs that enable inexpensive manufacturing are needed to continue commercial expansion of microfluidic mixer use.